Interests:military technology, military history, weapon systems, management/organizational design, early American history

Posted 28 February 2011 - 1102 AM

I'm kinda thinking about trying it on my home desktop, probably this summer. a 64 GB Crucial SATA3 SSD drive is going for $125 on newegg. One caveat I have learned about is that some SSD drives have a microSATA interface, not a regular one. I don't know if a simple converter cable is adequate to interface such a drive to the onboard controller.

I've also read that, to keep the wear-leveling algorithm happy, its best to not fill up the drive. At the 64 GB size point, I can have Win7, all apps, and a swapfile well within 45 GB. Most user data will have to be moved to hard disks (somehow I've accumulated 25 GB in my Desktop folder...).

There appears to be some debate as to whether data on SSDs encrypted by whole-disk or whole-partition programs like TrueCrypt is really safe or not.

Finally made the jump. The cost is still way too high, but the results are ridiculous. So fast, it responds the moment I click on a program.

I've got a 120GB in my new monster system (AMD 6-core, 16 GB RAM, Radeon HD 6580 card), and it's laughably fast. I just keep the OS and the programs that benefit from being on an SSD (Adobe programs, games, etc.), and will start culling at 75% capacity.

Yes, the SSD is the C:. However, like FCO said, I've got most of my non-essential programs on my backup drive. It's a 10K Raptor, so things run pretty fast.

Win 7 Forums also has loads of tips to make it even faster. When I installed the new drive, I installed Win 7 again. I was able to move all documents to the extra drive, including My Documents.

Kinda off topic. But a External drive is always a good idea. During the lightning strike I lost allot of stuff, but my backup drive (RAID) had all the stuff that mattered the power supply got fried but the drives survived. So did my wifes drive. Lots of records and stuff. Back to regular scheduled posting.

I took my former secondary drive and put it in an external enclosure. I turn it on for backups.

I've been using an SSD for two years now, with 2 primary storage drives and 5 hard drives in a RAID 5 array externally for backup. It's a nice, stable setup that hasn't given me any problems. New SSDs coming out this year are cheaper and better-performing that my old one, so I'm thinking about buying two of the smaller SATA 6Gbps models and set them up in a RAID 0 array to get max performance. It's really nice to have practically zero boot-up times for my programs.

Anyone made the jump yet to SSD on their desktop machine? I'm hesitant due to the high price.

For what? Cache? Disk storage?

MacBook Airs use them. They're fairly common around here. We have 80 and 160 Gb SSD cache systems on servers to speed up response time and dramatically reduce latency on disk intensive activities. The SSD 'disks' DO have a finite lifetime due to the nature of SSD and the max number of writes. But in calculations it ends up being on the order of years of activity. Usually they're sized larger than the nameplate size to also account for this and have spare "sectors" to write to.

MacBook Airs use them. They're fairly common around here. We have 80 and 160 Gb SSD cache systems on servers to speed up response time and dramatically reduce latency on disk intensive activities. The SSD 'disks' DO have a finite lifetime due to the nature of SSD and the max number of writes. But in calculations it ends up being on the order of years of activity. Usually they're sized larger than the nameplate size to also account for this and have spare "sectors" to write to.

Can you please explain more? So these are like Flash drives or CD-R/W / DVD-R/W which have a limit of writes before they go kaput?

Interests:military technology, military history, weapon systems, management/organizational design, early American history

Posted 22 August 2011 - 2107 PM

Kinda off topic. But a External drive is always a good idea. During the lightning strike I lost allot of stuff, but my backup drive (RAID) had all the stuff that mattered the power supply got fried but the drives survived. So did my wifes drive. Lots of records and stuff. Back to regular scheduled posting.

Yeah, no excuse these days. Buy a portable drive with USB2, or preferably USB3, interface. Back up personal stuff, don't bother with software you can download/buy later. Keep the drive in your "go bag". That way its pretty well isolated from lightning & power surges, plus if some crackhead steals your desktop machine, you've still got your critical data. And if you need to get the flock out of Dodge, just grab your go bag and go. No need to crack open your desktop case, yank the drives, etc.

Can you please explain more? So these are like Flash drives or CD-R/W / DVD-R/W which have a limit of writes before they go kaput?

These are FLASH drives. Solid State Drives. Other forms use other memory types but FLASH based drives are preferred because they don't require power to maintain the memory state. However, you have a finite number of writes that can be made to the memory bits. We have Fusion IO PCIe Cache cards which use this technology but they're addressed via the PCIe bus rather than via the ATA bus. There are companies who also make disk arrays that have trays with 10+ disks in arrays of 5-10 trays, basically as FAST Storage in place of conventional disk arrays of the same format. you're limited by the speed of the Array system and usually Fiber Channel or what you're running through, but you're NOT waiting on disk latency. We've installed VERY large arrays to get the latency for writes down as much as possible, but have not yet gone to SSD based arrays.

Functionally, the IO cards are a neat trick though as they allow your system to cache things that it would normally have to write to disk. IF you need a good bit of swap space you can have a system slow down waiting on disks to respond, even with a striped array. The Fusion IO cards enhance this, dramatically. You can also put things like frequently used files for games or applications here and it makes those operations dramatically faster. Again, because you're waiting NOT on disk spindles to come around with the next block, rather it's all up to the clock cycles of the system to read the data from the SSD FLASH drive.

FLASH based hardware of course has limited Writes to the bits based on how the bits are flipped in a write.

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia....mory#NAND_flashMemory wearAnother limitation is that flash memory has a finite number of program-erase cycles (typically written as P/E cycles). Most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand around 100,000 P/E cycles, before the wear begins to deteriorate the integrity of the storage.[8] Micron Technology and Sun Microsystems announced an SLC flash memory chip rated for 1,000,000 P/E cycles on December 17, 2008.[9]

If you use it as a primary disk and keep your data on a regular drive the amount of writing to the disk is really not an issue. The disks also has a logic to minimize writing to the same cells and instead spreading the writes to different cells.

Yeah, no excuse these days. Buy a portable drive with USB2, or preferably USB3, interface. Back up personal stuff, don't bother with software you can download/buy later. Keep the drive in your "go bag". That way its pretty well isolated from lightning & power surges, plus if some crackhead steals your desktop machine, you've still got your critical data. And if you need to get the flock out of Dodge, just grab your go bag and go. No need to crack open your desktop case, yank the drives, etc.

Unless the external HD dies for no explicable reason - just as what happened in my case.

These are FLASH drives. Solid State Drives. Other forms use other memory types but FLASH based drives are preferred because they don't require power to maintain the memory state. However, you have a finite number of writes that can be made to the memory bits. We have Fusion IO PCIe Cache cards which use this technology but they're addressed via the PCIe bus rather than via the ATA bus. There are companies who also make disk arrays that have trays with 10+ disks in arrays of 5-10 trays, basically as FAST Storage in place of conventional disk arrays of the same format. you're limited by the speed of the Array system and usually Fiber Channel or what you're running through, but you're NOT waiting on disk latency. We've installed VERY large arrays to get the latency for writes down as much as possible, but have not yet gone to SSD based arrays.

Functionally, the IO cards are a neat trick though as they allow your system to cache things that it would normally have to write to disk. IF you need a good bit of swap space you can have a system slow down waiting on disks to respond, even with a striped array. The Fusion IO cards enhance this, dramatically. You can also put things like frequently used files for games or applications here and it makes those operations dramatically faster. Again, because you're waiting NOT on disk spindles to come around with the next block, rather it's all up to the clock cycles of the system to read the data from the SSD FLASH drive.

FLASH based hardware of course has limited Writes to the bits based on how the bits are flipped in a write.

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia....mory#NAND_flashMemory wearAnother limitation is that flash memory has a finite number of program-erase cycles (typically written as P/E cycles). Most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand around 100,000 P/E cycles, before the wear begins to deteriorate the integrity of the storage.[8] Micron Technology and Sun Microsystems announced an SLC flash memory chip rated for 1,000,000 P/E cycles on December 17, 2008.[9]

Also SD Cards can be used for more than photos. I watch for good brands to go on sale and then I pick them up. My netbook has a 32GB "backup" drive.